Voter apathy: What do we care about?

Published 9:29 am, Thursday, April 4, 2013

Voter apathy is rarely a case of tacit approval of a school board’s performance; more often, it results from a silent majority who don’t know the true importance of their vote.

In Humble ISD for the last three elections, voter turnout for school board elections has never exceeded 2.4 percent and has not been above 5.75 percent in the last 13 years. Will the same be said of 2013? Will six of our seven school board positions be decided by a handful of the 100,000 registered Humble ISD voters who bother to show up at the polls?

For the school board election on May 11, I think we’ll show that we just don’t care.

We don’t care if a trustee has the endorsement of the local Chamber of Commerce, because sadly, our chamber leadership has shown it’s addicted to Big Education funded by taxpayers and local businesses. We don’t care if an incumbent school board member has been a trustee for 24 years because she sat quietly over the decline of education standards and student performance in our district during her tenure. If a candidate says he “cares about kids,” that’s great, but we don’t care about his empty words because every one of us care about our own kids more than any politician ever will.

We don’t give a hoot if a candidate boasts about being an attorney, because despite his sizable ego, he still serves by the consent of the voters. We could care less if a trustee candidate is “home grown,” because in politics, that can translate into just more taxpayer-funded boondoggles for his “home grown” buddies.

We are oh-so apathetic about a candidate’s golf score or his position at the local country club or civic group. What about the skin color, ethnicity or gender of a candidate? Well, we don’t care about that either, because as a school board trustee, he or she is to serve all children in our diverse district equally.

So what do we care about in a 2013 school board election? We care about the high cost of public education eating away at our household budgets and our ability to provide for our own families and retirement. We are interested in trustees who defend the values and ethics of parents and grandparents here in Atascocita, Humble and Kingwood - not the moral decay and rot reflected by many urban, inner-city school districts we've tried to escape.

We want trustees who realize we’d have more money for teachers and education if only the district hired fewer full-time non-teacher employees, favoring out-sourced labor instead. While we cherish our Second Amendment rights, we feel that putting armed guards in every elementary school is overkill.

We also care about the First Amendment rights of our young adult students as well as their Constitutional protections against self-incrimination and unreasonable search and seizure. And we care for trustees who are responsive leaders, not rubber-stamps for an agenda set by Superintendent Dr. Guy Sconzo via “guidance” provided by Austin special-interest groups.

The fact is, we do care about who represents us on our school board. But the only way to prove it is to actually show up at the polls and cast our votes on May 11.